In this edition of The Out Door, we consider how audience can affect the context of a performance; talk humor, improv, and country music in a video interview with longtime guitar improviser Eugene Chadbourne; explore the woven drones of Boredoms' Shinji Masuko; and discuss family and memory with ambient folk artist Black Eagle Child. (Note that the Out Door is on Twitter. Get news and updates regarding artists we write about here.)

I: Bert Jansch, Michael Chapman, and the Context of Audience

The setting couldn't have been better: On a recent early spring Thursday night in Carrboro, NC, I stood in a boutique record store and watched the British guitarist Michael Chapman (pictured above) play five feet in front of me. The door was swung wide, and half of the PA system sat on the sidewalk, broadcasting the rare American set from the 70-year-old songwriter to everyone within earshot. People drifted past, pausing for a song or two, occasionally weaseling their way inside to find a spot among the three-dozen mostly attentive listeners who had tessellated themselves between rows of records. I stood in the front, sipping a milkshake, my right arm around my girlfriend, listening to Chapman play "Kodak Ghosts", one of the most perfectly sad songs ever written. Imagining an improvement seemed impossible.

Chapman is a marginally important person in the history of rock'n'roll, having led Mick Ronson to David Bowie and written songs that both Led Zeppelin and Elton John arguably reinterpreted for their own work. More than a footnote, though, he's also a remarkable songwriter and guitarist. Some tunes from his earliest albums-- like the aforementioned "Kodak Ghosts", from the newly reissued Fully Qualified Survivor-- are keen reflections on loneliness, rendered with a novelist's sense of scenario. Meanwhile, the new Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967–2010 collects fresh recordings of more than four decades of Chapman instrumentals. He showcases a variety of styles and techniques that confirm him as a polyglot master, a certain forebear to younger artists like Sir Richard Bishop and William Tyler. In Carrboro, some might have shown up for Chapman, the footnote legend, but after his 90-minute set, it's difficult to think they left with anything but an appreciation for his craft and his remarkably comforting and avuncular presence.

Bert Jansch*

Just a few weeks before, I'd seen another legend of the same era play about a dozen miles away in a much different context. Bert Jansch opened for longtime fan Neil Young in the Durham Performing Arts Center, a posh auditorium that holds more than 2,700 people. The cheapest tickets were $69, while the most expensive cost $199 each. The entire room sold out in less than a day, and, as best as I could tell, no one had spent their monthly entertainment allowance just to see Jansch. During Young's solo set, of course, the audience was either rabid or reverent, playing air drums and shouting praises during classics like "Cortez the Killer" while doing its level-best to abide new songs, like the badly written "Sign of Love".

Jansch didn't get the same pardon. Since the 2006 release of his exquisite The Black Swan, Jansch's intermittent tours with headlining fans like Young, Pete Doherty, and Devendra Banhart have been interrupted by long stays in the hospital. It was apparent that he wasn't operating at full capacity in Durham. His set was an interesting mix of his own tunes and covers, including Jackson C. Frank's lovely "Carnival", and his playing-- fleet, exquisite picking defined by cascades of thin notes-- was as immaculate as always. But on the first day of tour, he seemed tired, maybe shell-shocked, perhaps not yet adjusted to life on the road. You could hear it in his voice, which sometimes sounded a little like a cross between a whimper and a slur. The audience didn't do him any favors. Some joked how it must be nice to be a friend of Neil's and get a prime opening slot, even if no one had heard of you; when a gaggle of Neil Young fans joke about someone who "can't sing worth a lick," you know you're sitting in an audience that's out for blood.

Between 1968 and 1973, Bert Jansch played with the pivotal British folk benders Pentangle, just as Chapman recorded and released his four most famous records for the Harvest Records label. The starts of their careers were so close, in fact, that in the liner notes for the Fully Qualified Survivor reissue, Chapman talks about hearing Jansch's name for the first time just after he'd become a full-time musician himself: "One night, this bloke comes up to me and says, 'You must be mates with Bert Jansch. You play the way he does.' And I said: 'Who is Bert Jansch?' I was completely ignorant of that folk scene." Neither Jansch nor Chapman ever got really famous, but they've always had prominent boosters and fans. What's more, in the past decade, they've earned some cachet among a new generation of listeners thanks both to good labels interested in their work (from Drag City to Tompkins Square) and indie rock's interest in acoustic music that takes risks (Jansch toured with Banhart, and Chapman is about to hit the road with Bill Callahan). That's how they both wound up in North Carolina in April, after all.

Their shows offered a revealing look at the way people hear unfamiliar music. Aside from the relative sizes of the stages and audiences, one of the key differences between the sets was the demographic for which they played. Chapman's clutch of dozens was mostly folks in their 20s and 30s (a few in their 40s), many of whom play in bands of their own and visit All Day Records to, you know, buy records. The scent was that familiar, understated mix of perspiration, marijuana, and cheap beer that's particular to such low-budget art spaces. You got the sense that, for Chapman's crowd, new music was a necessity.

Jansch's crowd-- or, more honestly, Young's crowd-- smelled more like Nordstrom, doused in competing soaps and perfumes and colognes. There were plenty of listeners below 30, of course, but, generally, the crowd was markedly well dressed, well groomed and, well, old. They were there for legacy. And, at least around me, the older the patron, the more likely they were offended by Jansch. Rather than head for the lobby or restroom or sit and passively daydream while he played, they audibly snickered, cheering mostly when he announced he had one song left. Two men behind me mistook the nuance and care in Jansch's songs as laziness or, worse yet, a sort of effete lack of rock'n'roll machismo. "Any dude in Raleigh in a bar with a guitar is better than this joke," one chortled.

At first, those responses were frustrating, but, eventually, hearing Jansch in the opening-band, big-room context became an interesting exercise regarding my own tastes. Legends are often assumed to be forever great: How many times have you tried to hear someone defend Dylan's barely intelligible 2011 voice from the stage, or vouch for a lazy Tom Waits show during the past decade? Within experimental music, you can suffer a lot of fools like that. I've heard new drones defended on the basis of past works much more often than I've heard someone vouch for Neil Young's Greendale because Harvest is so perfect. Improvised music is too often the domain of résumé builders, where you begin to matter once you've collaborated with Sonny Rollins or Christian Fennesz or their respective equivalents.

But in Durham, it seemed like I was one of the few who walked through the doors convinced that there were two masters on the bill. As the folks behind me flung Jansch quips like fuselage, I asked myself why what Jansch did mattered to me, how it spoke to me. The answer, thankfully, came easy: As soon as he tuned his guitar and wove those fingers through those strings, my questions were answered. Jansch, the guitarist, has the sort of touch and tone that's built for envy. I could forgive his singing problems for a lifetime in order to hear those six strings bend and glide. But watching Chapman in a record store, standing in a small crowd that had come just to see him, that question seemed less relevant. No one complained, not that there was really a reason to do so. It seemed to be a foregone conclusion that he, if not great, was at least interesting and legendary, just like Neil Young in his respective hall. I laughed as I wondered how, roles reversed, Chapman might have fared in the big room. --Grayson Currin